London Fintech Podcast

In this Xmas special we zoom out from Fintech to Tech as a whole in one of Europe’s coolest capitals – Berlin. Ivan is a great person to guide us through the scene having spent many years in the Ur-tech hub of San Francisco/Silicon Valley. This also means that he understands both the outsiders perspective […]

Saudi Arabia is a country that increasingly confounds stereotypes and expectations – an example being a YouTuber who has visited every country in the world choosing it for his honeymoon. At the same time it has undergone a phenomenal journey literally in a lifetime from a very low economic standard of living to super-high. As […]

Why buy alternative assets? Well in extremis what else would you buy?

Back in the 70s getting mortgages took months – there was a mortgage queue (&before techies get over-excited about how “bad” this was it was one of the factors restraining insane bull markets in residential property). Fast forward and the median mortgage in the UK is granted in 19 business days which is still a […]

The speed of change is super-rapid and nowhere more than in payments where advance rapidly leapfrogs advance. For the past two years “orchestration” has been The Thing (see eg LFP213 a deep dive into that topic). However now we have the latest greatest kid on the block the idea of curation. If orchestration solved the […]

The world is quite a large place but who better to cover the situation and trend in real-time payments than Craig Ramsey Head of Global Real Time Payments at ACI Worldwide who process around a billion payments per day with total value in the trillions of dollars. In this episode we dive into real time […]

Scaling any successful technology firm (who can expand so much faster than ~”bricks and mortar” firms) involves considerable challenges. These challenges are only compounded by challenges with surrounding infrastructure which, shall we say, aren’t even around the world. What may be taken for granted in the world’s leading tech hubs may be conspicuously absent in […]

It was not that long ago that business lending decisions took days, weeks, or even months. This lengthy period – and then need to perhaps apply to multiple banks was a severe challenge for many organisations, many of whom over time have gone bust whilst going through such processes. But what if using the best […]

Although the title is apparently three-fold re episode topic the Chinese Fintech market is very different from other markets we have touched upon so far and one that we definitely need to dive into. You will have heard of Alipay but may not know that as long as a decade ago they overtook Paypal to […]

Over a decade into the Fintech revolution its a rare episode that covers something entirely fresh and furthermore a show that I end up thinking I should check out downloading the app – and not just me – everyone who uses insurance (that’ll be everyone) may well do too. Rnwl promise to take the hassle […]

This is a super-rare episode on a fundamentally different way of assessing consumer loan risk so far into the Fintech Age focusing on an area which is bizarrely massively undercovered namely that of utilising Open Banking Data for credit assessment of personal loans. Furthermore this is a rare example of a Fintech – the parent […]

This is a very unique (sic) in the long history of the podcast in that I have finally found a guest brave enough and kind enough to talk about the experience of business failure as well as the human journey through it. Naturally the LFP focuses on proven successes if only to provide North Stars […]

So rapid is the rate of change in banking and the nature of and control of money right now that today we set a record and have a returning guests a mere 6 months later. Mario (YouTube Channel) first joined us in Feb22 for the gargantuan LFP197 “Money in the 21stC: Ballooning Printing of Fiat/QE/”MMT”/Govt […]

In this episode we dive not just into the world of Islamic Finance and Fintech but the practical lessons we can learn from the world’s oldest “ethical investment” tradition. In particular in an ever-changing world there is always the need to extend and interpret any given set of “ethical finance” guidelines for new circumstances. The […]

The next in our geographic coverage series on global Fintech past present and future with a special bonus of a taste of Fintech in Asia as Michael, a former Fintech founder himself turned VC at Runa Capital had just returned from a three week trip all around the region. Like all regions the US has its […]

Is the structure of regulation in need of refactoring? Do we have a kind of Reg Debt situation – cf Tech Debt – where organic growth has led to complexity, inefficiency and indeed regulations stretched beyond their original purpose? In this episode Alistair and I discuss some specific examples that would indicate that after as […]

The latest in the LFP’s coverage of Fintech in geographical regions and this fascinating balance between the bottom-up and the top-down, between localisation and globalisation of Fintech. As always when covering vast territories containing many nations,  “regions” contain widely differing conditions, not least of which background of FS  structure and infrastructure in the first place. […]

The majority of successful exits for companies are via trade sale (not that given the media hype you’d necessarily imagine it was anything but IPOs). Furthermore the percentage of companies that list on an exchange is falling meaning, that along with the economic circumstances, private companies and remaining in the unlisted space is becoming ever […]

It is a well-known trope that although failure is a challenge rapid success, though more desirable lol, can be too.  In this episode we dive into the fascinating Case Study of Ecospend who went from startup to trade sale to world open-banking payments leaders Trustly in five years. Along the way they beat off incumbent […]

In this episode we discuss VC early stage investment and whether there is a “VC funding winter” as some have called it or whether just a correction. How should early stage founders who want to raise funds maximise their chances of doing so? Few VCs go down to early stage investing but what factors do […]